Stum tvang: En teori om kapitalens økonomiske magt

Despite a decade of crisis and social unrest, capitalism is in many ways stronger than ever before. Never before have such a large share of the global population and such large parts of life been so tightly woven into the social logic that Karl Marx identified as the ‘all-dominating economic power in bourgeois society’: capital. Capital is not a certain category of things, but rather a process in which things are used in a certain way, namely as a means of making money, i.e., purchasing and selling with the aim of accumulating wealth in its abstract, monetary form. In other words, capital is the valorisation of value.
This thesis is an attempt to contribute to the explanation of how capital maintains its position as the ruling principle of the organisation of the reproduction of society. Earlier attempts to answer this question has tended to rely on the (often implicit) assumption that power essentially comes in two fundamental forms: violence and ideology. From such a perspective, the power of capital is explained with reference to either the guaranteeing of property rights by means of (the threat of) state violence or the ideological legitimisation of capitalist relations of production or—in most cases—a combination of these two. The fundamental claim of this thesis is that this violence-ideology couplet overlooks a form of power that is crucial for the reproduction of capitalism, but cannot be reduced to neither violence nor ideology, namely what Marx refers to in Capital as ‘the mute compulsion of economic relations’, or what I will also refer to as economic power. In contrast to violence and ideology, economic power addresses the subjugated part in a relationship of domination indirectly through its social and material surroundings and conditions. Violence addresses the body by inflicting pain and injury, and ideology addresses the ways in which we understand ourselves and our surroundings. In contrast, economic power forces people to do certain things by reorganising the social and material conditions of their existence.
In pre-capitalist societies, exploitation of workers was anchored in personal relationships of dependence, upheld by (the threat of) direct, physical coercion. The unique thing about capitalism is that the exploited class is tied to the exploiting class through an abstract, anonymous and impersonal form of power. This thesis is an attempt to construct a systematic theory of this mute compulsion. The foundations for such a theory can be found scattered out all over Marx’s writings. Marx himself, however, never explicitly worked it out, and, as I demonstrate in this thesis, his successors and interpreters have not succeeded in formulating a satisfactory theory of the mute compulsion of capital either, though several Marxist studies from the last couple of decades have succeeded in uncovering many important aspects of its workings. The thesis therefore proceeds from a critical reading of Marx’s writings in order to excavate essential insights and combine them with other insights drawn from relevant scholarly literature, Marxist as well as non-Marxist. 
The thesis consists of three parts with two chapters in each. Part one is about conditions in a two-fold sense: the conceptual conditions of the rest of the thesis and the real conditions of the economic power of capital. Through a discussion of the concept of capital as well as the concept of power in mainstream social sciences, the work of Michel Foucault and the Marxist tradition, chapter one clarifies what is meant by the expression ‘the power of capital’. Chapter two examines the social ontology of economic power. On the basis of a reconstruction of Marx’s widely ignored but highly original analysis of the human body, I attempt to explain why it is possible for human societies to materialise relations of domination in the social, technological and natural processes upon which the reproduction of society rests.
The second part of the thesis (chapters 3 and 4) concerns one of the two main sources of the economic power of capital: the relations of production, i.e., the social relations without which capitalist production would be impossible. These relations can be grouped into two categories: the vertical (class) relations between exploiters and exploited and the horizontal relations among the units of production. Chapter three demonstrates that capitalism relies on a historically unique form of class domination, which under normal circumstances allows the class that controls the means of social reproduction to force workers to perform surplus labour without having to resort to violence. In this chapter, I also discuss the relation between the production of commodities and the reproduction of labour-power as well as the question of how we account for the fact that the performance of reproductive labour has been forced upon women throughout the entire history of capitalism. Chapter four examines how the organisation of social production by means of the exchange of the products of labour as commodities gives rise to a set of (market) mechanisms that subjects everyone—proletarians as well as capitalists—to the imperatives of capital. The central concepts here are value and competition. In this chapter, I also address an important question that is widely neglected in the literature: what is the precise relationship between the vertical and the horizontal relations?
Part three examines the other main source of the economic power of capital: the dynamics set in motion by the relations examined in part two. These dynamics are simultaneously an effect and a cause of the power of capital. This power thus has a circular structure as it is partly the result of its own exercise. Chapter five analyses the consequences of the more or less constant organisational, material and technological reconfiguration of the production process, which capitalists are forced to undertake due to pressure from competitors as well as workers. This dynamic, which Marx encapsulates in the concept of real subsumption, results in a tendency to create processes of production that are only compatible with one social logic: the valorisation of value. In the second half of the chapter, I analyse two concrete examples of how the mute compulsion of capital works, namely the industrialisation and globalisation of agriculture since the 1940s and the so-called logistics revolution of the 1970s. Chapter six is about surplus population and crisis. In the first part of the chapter, I demonstrate how the immanent tendency of capital accumulation to generate a relative surplus population is one of the mechanisms by means of which the logic of valorisation imposes itself on social life. I then go on to interpret capitalist crises, not as a portending of the final breakdown of capitalism but rather as a mechanism of domination through which capital re-establishes the conditions of a new and expansive round of accumulation.
The result of this analysis is a theory which enables us to transcend the violence-ideology couplet that has hitherto restricted our capacity to grasp the power of capital. The theory of the mute compulsion of economic relations makes it possible to fill an important gap in the existing literature and helps us to understand how the expansive logic of capital imposes itself on the life of society—not only by means of violence and ideology, but also by inscribing itself in the material structures of social reproduction.